


Tribute and Tributary

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Pining, Pre-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 16:23:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15733086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Heimdall waits; Brunnhilde returns.





	Tribute and Tributary

**Author's Note:**

> I am enough of a geek to leave in that "hile" as an old-fashioned version of "hail," which I thought when I first wrote this was a real antiquated word and which turned out to actually just be from the Dark Tower series. So: Idris Elba crossover bonus?

She always comes back from battle with blood still dripping from her sword. It falls in drops to the Observatory floor and dries there, and sometimes Heimdall will move to stand so that the toe of his boot overlaps with a stain and he will think—know—that he should let these feelings go, but he does not.

The Valkyrie Brunnhilde moves like a wave crashing against the shore. She swaggers. They all move like that, maybe, but he only notices it with her, because she’s the only one who grins while she does it; she is in on the joke, the grin implies, but the joke is not her, oh no. The joke is everything else. He could seduce her because she is willing to be seduced—Valkyries are tireless—but, he thinks with a smile, he could not make her sentimental over a drop of a stranger’s blood. He does not want a halfway thing. His heart will take its lesson in time.

It’s the tradition of his profession to pine. The Guardians of the Bifrost have a long and storied history of standing and watching as the lives of others are led around them. You have to have a certain kind of temperament, Heimdall’s predecessor told him. Her eyes were hard but not unkind. You have to be able to see them come and go, knowing you’ll seldom be able to follow.

Seldom isn’t never, Heimdall said.

No, she said, it’s worse.

And now he understands that. If he took a lover, he could offer moments. He could not offer his life, which he has already sworn away.

The problem is that no one tells Brunnhilde that he has decided to be so noble as to forego her.

She comes back from conquest, her armor blotched with blood, her sword sheathed, her eyes exhausted. She comes back alone. Not the sole survivor of her squadron, but the only one unhurt. She’ll make her report to Odin and then, he knows, return to her sisters. She is a passable nursemaid, though she lacks the temperament for it.

“Hile, Gatekeeper,” she says to him. 

It is an antique word. Sometimes he forgets that she is older than he is. “Hile, Valkyrie.”

She takes off her helm and unbinds her hair, which falls down long and loose. “You must have seen the mess I came from.” She shakes her head. “Dismal little place, anyway. I don’t know why the goddess wants it.”

Hela says even the smallest and dirtiest of worlds can be strung like a bead and, in the company of others, be an ornament to Asgard; lately Odin has started adding that that means the beads cannot be too scratched, too chipped. Lately that has been making Hela frown. Even the purest gold must be melted down in order for it to be shaped, she says. Hela mixes her metaphors to best allow for destruction.

“We don’t get to ask,” Heimdall says, though lately he wonders.

She looks at him, her eyes flashing. “I didn’t.”

“No,” he admits.

She unbuckles her armor. “Do you know,” she says conversationally, “we talk about you? Heimdall the All-Seeing, we imagine the things you must see, the things you must know. But it would be stupid to take you to bed, wouldn’t it? I would have to see you all the time.”

There is a catch in his throat, but he keeps his voice even. “You might be disappointed in any case. Whatever I know, I can seldom practice it.”

“Yet it’s the sovereign right of a returning Valkyrie to demand tribute.”

“As in gold.”

“You wear gold,” she says. “Perhaps I would have it off you, piece by piece.”

She does. She stinks of sweat and carnage, but her breasts heave when he enters her with his fingers, and her legs are strong around his waist when she mounts him.

“You look like a crab stripped of his shell,” she says, atop him, her eyes half-closed. “I would like to see you like this again.” She pins his wrists to the floor and tightens her grip around them, her whole body tightening on him at the same time. “I would like to see you like this in a bed, where I could have you however I liked. Would you give yourself to me, Gatekeeper? I would give you your practice like you were a harp and I a skald.”

“What does the harp know of how it’s played?” He asks only to distract himself, though he suspects, in truth, that she will have no real joy from this; he suspects that is not what she is after.

“The harp knows the harpist,” Brunnhilde says, “and waits for her,” and there is a tension in her voice, very much like a harp-string indeed, and he wonders what he has not seen.

It is two months before Hela’s fall, three months before the fall of the Valkyries. Three months and two days before he watches Brunnhilde go.

“Come with me,” she says, stopping only briefly. She does not kiss him. They have never done that.

But he likes what Asgard is becoming, though he does not like what it has cost to get them there. “I can’t.”

She nods. He doesn’t know if he has ever surprised her. “Wait for me, then.”

“Will you come back?”

“No,” she says, before the Bifrost takes her. “But I want to know you’re there all the same.”

It takes him a thousand years to stop looking her way, and a thousand after that to see her again, on the bridge with chaos around them.

“Still here?” Brunnhilde says to him during a lull in the battle. “You might not even remember me, but—”

“Still here,” Heimdall says.


End file.
